I wanted to travel directly after college but instead got straight to work. I'm now 31 and in the last year have developed a couple dozen food allergies, to the point that I very literally cannot eat out at restaurants. I have to prepare everything myself.
This change has completely destroyed my will to travel. Or, rather, makes me regret not having traveled when I had the chance to enjoy one of the best parts of it: the food. And not just the food itself, though that is a big draw -- more important is the logistics of not having to cook all your food yourself, needing specific products from specific brands (and if you can't find them you're shit out of luck), etc. Travel for me is only possible in places where I have a kitchen (so, AirBnB), and the supplies required to meal prep. I'll spend a not insignificant amount of time in my new locale cooking and cleaning dishes, like I constantly do at home. No wandering around town checking out a restaurant. No airport food. No meeting new friends and them spontaneously treating me to dinner.
So, so many lost experiences. When I get in this mood and remember what life was like just a year ago before all these food allergies hit, when I was still planning on traveling the world "once Covid blew over," it makes me so, so sad. I can't believe I lost my chance just because I chose to work right out of college (worse, an internship that didn't end up hiring me).
Point being:
For whatever critique of travel this post might offer, just...if you can, travel. I never, ever thought that I would lose the ability to be somewhere and just...eat, without thinking. To try new food without fear of literally dying. I never knew that could happen to someone. I never knew the simple joy of eating somewhere I'd never been before could be taken away, that I would be trapped to the same tiny list of ingredients (ever-shrinking, I might add), the same depressingly small number of combinations formed by them, and by extension the physical entrapment, the loneliness, the sense of not being part of the group because I can't share in the meal.
God I hate it.
If you can, just fucking travel. Do it while you still can.
My dad was both a workaholic plus extremely, extremely, frugal despite being pretty successful. Frugal cars, frugal homes, frugal vacations, avoiding eating out, etc. The idea was that he'd work and save hard through his working years, then enjoy retirement to the fullest. He and my mom were looking forward to traveling the world, etc.
Then right before he retired he got something called IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). While not life threatening, it reduced his quality of life significantly as well as sending him into depression. While he is a lot better both physically and mentally now. I would say he is 90%+ recovered in both aspects. But the damage is done, and he is now almost a homebody watching movies and Youtube all day because he fears not being close to the bathroom for extended periods (specifically, a comfortable home bathroom, not a public toilet). His lifelong golf hobby is effectively gone too.
Needless to say, I was raised to be frugal, which I always resisted. But after seeing what happened to my dad (and as a result, mom too), that resistance has turned into a fuck no. I certainly don't advocate splurging above your means, but I do advocate living life to the fullest, even if that means spending substantial money.
Other than going back to visit family in Korea a few times, my mom has never ventured outside the US northeast. My wife and I have made it a point to take her on a plane trip once a year since my dad can't, and she has been absolutely thrilled.
Bought my dad his dream car (a V8 BMW 5-series) because he still can't break out of his frugal mindset despite being financially well-off. Got yelled at for not being frugal and spending money when I gave it to him, but in spite of that he absolutely loves driving it.
I have no allergies, so I can't imagine how that is. However, I had a back injury 3 years ago. I thought it'd heal fast but I got to the point of being afraid to carry my backpack when traveling somewhere. The chance of having an incredibly sharp pain makes me fear almost any kind of activity.
I also put off traveling before and now I regret not doing it while I was physically able to walk/hike around for hours on end.
I did physical therapy, swimming etc to make it feel better, but by now it's clear it will never improve past a certain point.
No, auto-immune means that your immune system attacks the body. Allergies are where your immune system flags non-self, non-harmless stuff as harmful.
And the answer is: no one knows.
It’s rare for adults with no history of food allergies as children to develop them (that’s me —- ate whatever I wanted until last year). It’s even more rare for them to develop more than one or two. So, it’s probably just the generic lottery. Some gene decided to flip on one day. Just cosmically bad luck.
That said, I do have a pet theory that a high dose of methylprednisolone corticosteroids just prior to the appearance of the allergies fucked my immune system somehow. Unfortunately there’s zero other documented cases/scientific precedent for the hypothesis, besides the dubious timing. I was on them for two weeks, and literally the day after I finished tapering off of them, I started having reactions to tons of foods. Whether that’s correlation or causation will likely never be proven.
And even still, even if I could prove it, there’s fuck all I can do about getting a normal life back, because when adults develop food allergies, they’re permanent 99.9% of the time. We don’t have a way to “teach” the immune system that it mistakenly flagged something. That’s the holy grail right there but after seeing how far off we are from that, I’ve lost a lot of faith in medical science. You would think we’d be even in the same galaxy as producing that sort of cure, but we don’t even understand why the allergies develop yet. Plus, funding for food allergy research is funneled towards children —- who, quite often, grow out of their allergies as they reach adulthood. There’s reason to believe that the mechanisms of food allergy development differ significantly between adults and children, so all that research for kids might not even apply to me. The whole thing is a giant mess and I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of ever eating like a normal person again.
This change has completely destroyed my will to travel. Or, rather, makes me regret not having traveled when I had the chance to enjoy one of the best parts of it: the food. And not just the food itself, though that is a big draw -- more important is the logistics of not having to cook all your food yourself, needing specific products from specific brands (and if you can't find them you're shit out of luck), etc. Travel for me is only possible in places where I have a kitchen (so, AirBnB), and the supplies required to meal prep. I'll spend a not insignificant amount of time in my new locale cooking and cleaning dishes, like I constantly do at home. No wandering around town checking out a restaurant. No airport food. No meeting new friends and them spontaneously treating me to dinner.
So, so many lost experiences. When I get in this mood and remember what life was like just a year ago before all these food allergies hit, when I was still planning on traveling the world "once Covid blew over," it makes me so, so sad. I can't believe I lost my chance just because I chose to work right out of college (worse, an internship that didn't end up hiring me).
Point being:
For whatever critique of travel this post might offer, just...if you can, travel. I never, ever thought that I would lose the ability to be somewhere and just...eat, without thinking. To try new food without fear of literally dying. I never knew that could happen to someone. I never knew the simple joy of eating somewhere I'd never been before could be taken away, that I would be trapped to the same tiny list of ingredients (ever-shrinking, I might add), the same depressingly small number of combinations formed by them, and by extension the physical entrapment, the loneliness, the sense of not being part of the group because I can't share in the meal.
God I hate it.
If you can, just fucking travel. Do it while you still can.